Levine on BioShock PC issues

Irrational Games' Ken Levine has responded to concerns about the PC version of BioShock and squashed speculation that a PS3 version is in the offing. (Bad news for Sony Defense Force.)

Although quite lovely, BioShock on PC has faced a few teething problems - to say the least - since it launched in Europe on Friday. Most significant of these are those related to activation and copy protection. On the former, publisher 2K updated the Cult of Rapture website late last week with news that buyers will now be able to install BioShock on up to five PCs - with a "revoke tool" that you can run on a system to free up that key again and move it to another computer. 2K, Irrational and SecuROM are also looking at other technical issues, the post says.

Another point of contention has been the game's implementation of widescreen. As Ken Levine explains in a Joystiq interview: "We primarily designed it for widescreen. Then we had to ask, 'How do we make it full screen.' Your options are to put black bars at the top and bottom, keep same width perspective. Or you allow to...add pixels to the top and the bottom if you can afford the frame rate - we could." This being the Internet, we ended up with widescreen gamers complaining that they were being robbed of pixels. A patch is apparently inevitable: "We may disagree with them aesthetically, but sure, we'll make a patch and make if work for them," says Levine.

The other BioShocky things to note are that the Cult of Rapture website now offers the game's complete score for download (23MB, direct link). "The score was created by film, television and video game composer Garry Schyman and features a combination of early twentieth century writing, aleatoric elements, musique concrete, traditional tonal and late romantic styles that capture the distinct retro-futuristic aesthetic of the game," says 2K, allowing us to print the word 'aleatoric' without feeling silly.

And then there's the question of a PS3 version. "I promise you, there is no secret plan about the PS3 that we're keeping from people. There's no PS3 development going on that we're hiding." Shame.